Friday, July 3, 2015

I have never read a novel by Hanya Yanagihara, but, if the
reviewers are to be trusted, I have missed out on some excellent work.

Last week in the The New York Times, Yanagihara explained
why she has never wanted to go into therapy. The question arose when she was writing her last novel. At an especially difficult moment in the writing process she found that disturbing memories from her past were intruding on her concentration.

She explains:

Giving
yourself over to the emotional life of a book — particularly one largely
concerned with emotional life itself — demands a surrender. I was prepared for
that. What I was unprepared for was how the writing forced me to think anew
about my own past and my own fears, about episodes whose significance I had
always been able to dismiss or minimize. Suddenly, I found myself in the grip
of a life I no longer recognized.

It seemed natural and normal to explore her past experiences
through therapy. Others advised her to do as much. And yet, she had no
inclination to do so.

A therapist might say that she was suffering from a phobia
about therapy. We do better to respect her reasoning:

I have
never been to therapy, and over the years, it has changed from something
bewitching — as it still is for my father, as it once was for me — into
something sinister, a form of mind control, a violation of the self, like
scooping out your brain and placing it into someone else’s cupped palms to prod
at. As I’ve grown older, I’ve often wished I’d let that early attraction to
therapy become something else: a trust in it, perhaps. But the fear of loss of
control is greater than the hope for comfort.

You would think that a novelist, especially, would need to
recycle and reconfigure her past experiences, the better to render them on the
printed page. Doesn’t therapy help you to overcome the past, to gain insight
into the past and to integrate the past into a new life narrative?

Why would that not serve a novelist?

On the other hand, if a novel is merely rendering a personal
experience, why should anyone else care about it? Isn’t the point of art to
speak to large numbers of people, in different places and at different times?
If it’s just the artist’s personal experience, precious few people are going to
find it engaging.

Yanagihara had another reason for avoiding therapy. Perhaps
because she is Japanese-American she does not have the same propensity for
moral exhibitionism. She understands that therapy will try to break down her
sense of shame, and with it her dignity, her modesty, her humility and her honor.

Trying to attract the attention of readers by indulging in
shamelessness seemed to her not the way to go. Many philosophers have debated
the question of what kind of emotion art ought to be evoking. The question
remains somewhat open. And yet, most of them would agree that great art does not provoke a voyeuristic frisson.

Were Yanakihara writing about herself, about her own
experience, even her own traumas she would be taking an important creative
risk. The validity of the description of a real event lies in its correlation
with reality. A book of history is as good as its objective rendering of the
facts. If it tells exactly what happened it does not need to have narrative coherence.

A novel might refer to elements in the real world, but
its validity resides in its ability to create its own fictional world. The
coherence of a work of fiction lies in the extent to which it fulfills the
terms of the world that it has created. It should not be judged by how well it
renders reality.

A novelist writing about him or herself runs the risk of
seeing the value of the description in its factual accuracy, not in its ability
to fit within the fictional world he or she has created.

When a novelist is having trouble with a novel the problem
is not that she is not in touch with her feelings or her past, but that she is
allowing them to intrude in a world where they might very well break the spell.

Moreover, writing a novel is not therapeutic. It ought not
to be therapeutic. You should not consider writing a novel in order to come to
terms with your own history.

The same applies to acting. It certainly applies to Method
Acting, the technique that instructs students to get in touch with their own
feelings, the better to portray the emotion of the character they are playing.

But then, why would anyone care about your jealousy when your
job is to make them care about Othello’s? A good actor does not draw attention
to himself. He is a vehicle through which the play communicates with the
audience. In that situation, your personal feelings can only serve as a
distraction.

Doubtless, this helps make her the darling of certain members of the literary clique. In a world where merit no longer matters, people are promoted for reasons that have to do with political correctness. But, of course, that does not mean that she's a bad novelist. And it does not mean that she's wrong about therapy.

Alice Miller, in The Drama of the Gifted Child, explains that many successful persons, including artists, also tend to experience depression. Thus converting personal pain into professional success or "great art" is only a partly effective distraction for these persons. A good example is the woman who wants children, not because she has integrated her desire and capacity to love them (because she was loved as a child or figures out how she wanted to be loved as a child), but as a symbol of her adult status, "See, I have children, a man brings me money and bought me a house, so I'm a grown-up female!" Meanwhile some fathers and mothers play successful roles and make their children miserable. These children often become deviants or artists who can communicate their drama without betraying their parents by telling "the real story." A person with the capacity to decode signs and symbols will eventually begin to understand whether he or she is actually being loved in a given context or is once again being used as a prop in the drama of a gifted child, or trying to use others as props within one's own drama.